Facebook to limit how many invitations users get. No more spam?

Facebook is changing the way that application invites are handled, meaning that the user experience should be improved from “not another @&£?$#! invite” to… well, a bit more peace and quiet.

They’ve already changed the way notifications are sent out, so that they vary based upon how “spammed” users are feeling.

Instead of the fixed limit of 20 invitations per user per day, the new dynamic limits will be based upon a user’s historical invitation acceptance rate, whether an application forces users to invite friends (ARGH!), and some additional undisclosed factors which “reflect the affinity users show for the application as a whole”. Whatever they may be.

Tom Whitnah from Facebook Platform said, “Our hope is that requests will be better aligned with a user’s intention to share a good experience with an application and engage with friends in ways their friends will appreciate, not just with how frequently an application requests users invite friends.”

Facebook has also come down hard on application developers who force users to invite friends before they can proceed. Invitations have been turned off altogether on those apps until developers correct it.

On the surface, this sounds like good news for the casual Facebook user, who should hopefully be slightly less bombarded with notifications and invites every time they log in (I spend enough time sorting through invites already). Whether developers will mind is another matter, but if they design decent enough applications then word should spread virally anyway, without the need to force users to spam their friends.